How the WWW works

Every day, we use the internet: We chat on Whatsapp, we browse websites, and we scroll through the pictures and updates of our friends on Facebook courtesy of the invention of Tim Berners Lee called the World Wide Web which runs atop of the internet. It should at least interest us to know where our pictures go when we upload them on Facebook and what makes them visible to all our friends irrespective of their locations. It should interest us to know what happens to these uploads of ours and how we can chat with individuals that are on the other end of the globe on Whatsapp. These are some of the things we are going to dissect on this article.

Basically, the web is made up of three parts: The Browser, the Sever and the Protocol.

The browser is the program that enables a computer or a mobile device to view pages over the web. It is the tool for accessing the web. On computers it is a Mozilla firefox, Inernet explorer, Opera, chrome or a host of other browsers. On your android devices, you may have a browser app and the Facebook app alongside with Whatsapp and a host of other apps. However, all these apps access the internet and they are collectively called the browsers. So, any software application that requests the retrieval of information from the World Wide Web and displays the data on your PC is a browser.

The server is a special computer that is used to store the information shared on the web. It also runs a number of software that enables it to manage the large number of information that is saved on it. The software that runs on the server also retrieves the requested data and formats it for display or executes tasks requested by the browser.

The protocols at the most elementary form provides the method used to communicate between the browser and server. It establishes the rules for how information passes through the Internet without which you cannot communicate over the internet. There are two main types of protocol: the Internet protocol (IP) and the transmission control protocol (TCP). These protocols are what make communication through the internet possible.

So next time you send a Whatsapp chat or a BBM ping, you should know that the TCP/IP protocols are what make your communication possible the transmission possible. Your message uses these protocols to travel over the network, hitting domain name servers (DNS) of the network you are using and finding the right target for your message delivering your chat to them and opening a two way channel for the passage of more messages. In the next article, we would detail this process a little to give you better understanding of how your phone or laptop connects to the web.